This consciousness of self, springing from the consciousness of a historical idea, awakens in a people its will to historical formation: the will to action. The political people is no passive, sluggish mass, no mere object for the efforts of the state at government or protective welfare work ... The great misconception of the democracies is that they can see the active participation of the people only in the form of plebiscites according to the principle of majority. In a democracy the people does not act as a unit but as a complex of unrelated individuals who form themselves into parties ... The new Reich is based on the principle that real action of a self-determining people is only possible according to the principle of leadership and following.
According to Huber, geographical considerations play a large part in the shaping of a people:
The people stands in a double relation, to its lands; it settles and develops the land, but the land also stamps and determines the people ... That a certain territory belongs to a certain people is not justified by state authority alone but it is also determined objectively by its historical, political position. Territory is not merely a field for the exercise of state control but it determines the nature of a people and thereby the historical purpose of the state’s activity. England’s island position, Italy’s Mediterranean position, and Germany’s central position between east and west are such historical conditions, which unchangeably form the character of the people.
But the new Germany is based upon a “unity and entirety of the people" which does not stop at geographical boundaries:
The German people forms a closed community which recognizes no national borders. It is evident that a people has not exhausted its possibilities simply in the formation of a national state but that it represents an independent community which reaches beyond such limits.
The State justifies itself only so far as is helps the people to develop itself more fully. In the words of Hitler, quoted by Huber from Mein Kampf, “It is a basic principle, therefore, that the state represents not an end but a means. It is a condition for advanced human culture, but not the cause of it ... Its purpose is in the maintenance and advancement of a community of human beings with common physical and spiritual characteristics."
In the theory of the folk-Reich [voelkisches Reich], people and state are conceived as an inseparable unity. The people is the prerequisite for the entire political order; the state does not form the people but the people moulds the state out of itself as the form in which it achieves historical permanence....
The State is a function of the people, but it is not therefore a subordinate, secondary